Word: screens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Stokowski's orchestra swings into Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, the ballet on the screen turns into flowers, fairies, fish, falling leaves, mushrooms. Mickey Mouse appears in the title role of Paul Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice, with silent gusto steals the bearded sorcerer's magic cap. commands the broom to fetch water, forgets how to stop it, nearly drowns in the deluge that follows. To Igor Stravinsky's rip-roaring Rite of Spring, a primeval world, complete with dinosaurs, bubbles up, parades by, dies down. To Mussorgsky's spooky Night on Bald Mountain...
...Sorcerer's Apprentice, the hilarious ostrich and hippopotamus ballets) set a new high in Disney animal muggery. Others (the wave and cloud sequences of Bach's Fugue, and a queer series of explosive music visualizations performed by a worried and disembodied sound track, posing diffidently on the screen like a reluctant wire) recall the abstract cinemovies made about five years ago by New Zealand-born Len Lye, show how musical sensation may be transferred to visual images...
...recording operations Garity and Stokowski used 430,000 feet of sound track, cut and patched it eventually into 11,953 feet. When the recordings were played back in a specially equipped studio in Hollywood, brother engineers were astounded to hear Soundman Garity's sound follow characters across the screen, roar down from the ceiling, whisper behind their backs. RCA and Disney engineers, having built his equipment at a cost of $85,000, called it "Fantasound," and crowed that it would revolutionize cinema production like nothing since the invention of Technicolor...
Outspoken, aggressive little Director Mervyn Le Roy lost none of the story in transposing it to the screen. Even the saccharine qualities of Norma Shearer are skillfully tempered to fit the regenerated Countess. Only Robert Taylor, unfairly injected into big-league competition, falls behind the pace. But Director Le Roy's combination is too strong to be defeated by this single handicap...
...with Hollywood's new taste for social significance; and filmed with the inimitable MGM touch of authenticity, it could not miss its mark. It did not, but neither did it displace "The Mortal Storm" as by far the most credible and exciting Nazi-blaster ever flashed across the American screen...